Corryong and the Upper Murray

Upper Murray photographer Arnold Playle’s caption below his photograph of the Main Range taken from the Upper Murray seems to imply that the name ‘Kosciusko’ included the entire High Country area.

Corryong has a number of memorials to Banjo Paterson and the Man from Snowy River. A Brett Garling sculpture of ‘The Man from Snowy River’ stands outside the Visitor Information Centre. ‘The Man from Snowy River Bush Festival’ is held each year in April. And outside the Soldiers’ Memorial Hall in Donaldson Street there is the mural ‘The Men and Their Mounts’.

‘The Man from Snowy River’, Jack (Johnny) Riley is buried in Corryong’s Pioneer Cemetery. A storyboard at the Pioneer Cemetery tells Jack Riley’s story. No journey following the life of Jack Riley would be complete without following the trail of his last journey from his ‘homestead’ as described by Paterson in his photograph caption to the site of the hut near the junction of the Indi River and Surveyor’s Creek where there is a plaque marking the place where the hut once stood and where Jack Riley died on 14 July 1914.

Many of the most evocative memorials lie in the stories told and recorded in writing.  Tom recounted how his Uncle Jack Mitchell at Khancoban Station used to send Jack a bottle of whisky with anyone who was going out to Tom Groggin.  Jack knew of course, that Jack Riley would give the bearer of gift a great welcome.  When I was a child Tom loved telling the story as he remembered his father telling it: “See ‘ere now, I’m not one of them boozers, I likes it little and often.” The truth Tom explained, was that Jack Riley liked it little and very often.  By morning the bottle would be empty and Jack would say to his guest, “See  ‘ere now, he says, it’s time youse was going,” and with that he turn out his guest and hunted him away!

After Tom Mitchell returned from the Second World War in late 1945, he interviewed those who remembered Jack Riley and wrote the story he was told about Jack’s final journey:

Jack Riley’s end was sad, especially when you think of the picture painted by Banjo Paterson of the ‘stripling on the small and weedy beast.’ 

“He’d been pretty sick once before,” Mr Findlay said, “and had been away with that disease where your legs all swell up, you know, dropsy…but he was cured and had come back to his hut in Groggin. I was out there mustering cattle all round those hills with three other men and I called in to see old Jack and found him pretty bad. I said we would take him into Corryong to the doctor but he said no he’d rather stay there, so we left him, and went on with the mustering, but a few days later we looked in again and here is the poor old fellow lying on the floor just about at the end of his tether. So we knocked together a bit of a stretcher out of a couple of saplings and some hessian that was kicking round the hut and we set off to carry him in to the doctor..."

‘It must have been one hell of a journey along that hair raising track chipped along the slippery cliffs above the raging waters of the Indi tearing through the narrow defile of the Murray Gates formed by a great ridge of Mt Pinnabar on the Victorian side, and a series of almost vertical spurs coming down from the Granuaille Mountain on the New South Wales side. The men carrying the tiny shrunken form on the home-made stretcher slipped and stumbled and sent stones bounding and flying off into the misty depths below. The stretcher lurched and heaved. Jack Riley, his spirit hovering between this world and the one just a little beyond us all the time, all silent, or shouted sporadic bursts or words mingled with queer sounds. Snatches of song, strange names, imprecations, sighs, terms of endearment, yells of encouragement or warning to unseen men, came tumbling forth, sometimes with startling clarity, sometimes jumbled together, sometimes just a babble of incoherencies. It was cruel work on the carriers, but their only thought was for Jack Riley. At Hermit’s Creek they offered him a drink of his beloved whisky, but to their surprise he refused saying he could not swallow it. “Cripes, he must be crook,” someone remarked. The Hermit’s Hill was too steep for the party however much they tried, and it was decided to get Jack Riley onto a horse. Bob Butler was the smallest and lightest of the party and he jumped up onto the quietest of the horses and poor old Jack was lifted up into the saddle. Bob held him there with his arms round the thin waist. The horse, panting and straining, was led and flogged inch by inch up the mountain. At the top, reached after an eternity of doubt and struggle, the weather was blowing a bitter gale with flurries of snow coming stinging through the straining trunks of the forest. The trees roared back to the gale that tore limbs whole-sale from them. Jack Riley, his spirit hovering between this world and the one just a little beyond us, lay silent or shouted queer sounds. At the top of the climb where the stones displaced by the horses hoofs bounded off into misty space and then vanished in the depths below, Jack Riley’s head slumped and they thought he was gone but he rallied as they began to pick their way down the steep descent to the Hermit’s Creek.

“If we can get him to the hut at Surveyor’s Creek, we can get him into a bunk and warm and he will be right,” said Bob.

The hut was reached and Jack released from Bob’s cramped arms. Jack was carried into the hut and gently laid on the rough bunk and sticks were snapped and a fire got going.

“Now he’ll be O.K.,” someone said, but as the flames leapt up the chimney, they took the spirit of the Man from Snowy River with them.

“And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise

Their torn and ragged battlements on high. ....’

To follow the route of Jack Riley’s final journey is to follow a story of bush humanitarianism and of mateship before ever the expression was coined in the First World War. To see the steep terrain over which the ailing Jack was carried, part on a stretcher and part on the front of Bob Butler’s saddle is to go to the heart of bush humanitarianism and of a pioneer spirit that lies in the heart of Australian heritage

Some of the story of Paterson and Jack Riley lies in Tom Mitchell’s Second World War experiences and his interpretation of this experience in the post war decades. Remembering how some of the men from the Upper Murray who served in the First World War took with them small, pocket-sized anthologies of The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses to War with them, when Tom enlisted in 1941 he tried to buy a pocket-sized edition, only to find that they weren’t available any longer.

In 1914 recognising the need for those enlisting for active service to take something meaningful from home, Australia’s first publishing house Angus and Robertson produced pocket-sized editions of The Man from Snowy River and other Verses. Thus The Man from Snowy River found its way into the trenches on the Western Front and into the tunic pockets of Light Horsemen in Palestine and thus those pocket-sized anthologies did their bit to spread the verses and the question about the identity of the ‘Man’ from Snowy River. If Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and other Verses was good enough reading material for the men of the 1st AIF, it was exactly what Tom wanted to take with him. 

In one of his last letters to his mother before the Fall of Singapore, on 21 December 1941 Tom concluded his letter saying, ‘I have become quite a Banjo Paterson fan lately & find a breath of bygone Australian life, rough & unpolished though they might have been, most refreshing.’ Tom had taken his own copy of Paterson’s poetry, only to lose it when Singapore fell on 15 February 1942.

In the early months after the Fall of Singapore, knowing Tom’s regard for Paterson, a friend who had found an anthology of Paterson’s poetry from a library in Selarang Barracks gave it to Tom. Tom then typed out some poems to share with some of his mates other prisoners of war to keep their spirits up. Tom didn’t need any convincing that Jack Riley was ‘The Man’. Paterson’s poetry had kept his visions of home alive during his wartime service and incarceration in Changi Prisoner of War Camp. On his return home after the War, it seems that Tom wanted to give something back to Paterson and Jack or ‘Johnny’ Riley as Paterson referred to him. There were moments too when the memories of Jack Riley’s hermit’s life style offered the peace and quiet for which a former Prisoner of War survivor like Tom might have yearned. At the same time Tom also had the prescience to recognize what Paterson and his poem and its story could do for Corryong and his beloved Upper Murray.

As Shire President in 1946 and early 1947 and after Tom’s election to the seat of Benambra in a bi-election in June 1947, one of Tom’s top priorities was to choose and arrange for the headstone to be placed on Jack Riley’s grave. By this time recognition of Jack Riley as ‘The Man’ was gaining momentum. On Thursday 5 February 1948 on page two of the Corryong Courier, an article entitled ‘Man from Snowy River’ reports ‘In the peaceful Corryong cemetery lies the mortal remains of Jack Riley, a man whose magnificent horsemanship and feats in the mountain country inspired the late A. B. Patterson (sic.) to write his famous poem, The Man from Snowy River.’ The article concluded with the explanation ‘with the outbreak of the First World War looming, Jack Riley was buried in obscurity for many years. It was only recently that this headstone was erected to his memory through the influence of Mr. T. W. Mitchell, M.L.A., of Towong Hill, the then president of the local Shire.’ 

For all Tom’s conviction that Jack was the man his wife Elyne didn’t entirely agree and did her own research. . Elyne argued, ‘The great stockmen of the Jindabyne and Crackenback areas—men from Snowy River—were already creating their legend for Banjo Paterson to immortalize.’ Elyne lists ‘The Spencers, the Pendergasts of Moonbah, the Boltons, the McAllisters, the Barrys, the McGuffickes, George Irvine, Jack Adams, the Westons and McPhies, and others were all men who would gallop down precipitous mountain sides, crashing over loose stones, and through branches and bushes, jumping logs and rocks, ducking beneath boughs, to head a stampeding mob of cattle—or a brumby herd—all men who could ride unerringly through mist or pitch-dark night, and yet tell you that ‘no man’s a bushman in a fog.’ 

As well as Jack Riley, there was ‘Hellfire Jack Clarke from Jindabyne and Lachie Cochrane from Adaminaby as well as a number of other characters who may have been ‘The Man’, or at least part of the inspiration for the poem. Elyne might have seen the connection between Peter Lachlan Cohrane, one time member of the NSW Legislative Assembly and High Country horseman and his ancestor, Lachie. 

The father and son James Spencer are believed to have taken Paterson into the mountains but from the Jindabyne side of the Great Dividing Range. According to Elyne, Banjo gave the Spencer family with whom he stayed at Waste Point an autographed copy of his poem and a photograph. 

With Paterson’s legacy gaining a stronger hold in her latter years and perhaps emboldened by the wonderful success of the Brumby books, in the 1970s Elyne drew more direct inspiration from Paterson’s ‘Man From Snowy River’ for some of her subsequent children’s books, the Snowy River Brumby series, this series is based on both the Mitchells at Bringenbrong and the Spencer family who lived near Waste Point on the other side of the Great Dividing Range at Jindabyne. In her acknowledgements for The Colt from Snowy River (1979), Elyne wrote ‘Readers will realize that the idea for this book owes much to Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Man From Snowy River’. It is interesting that the Banjo, himself, wrote to my husband Tom saying that the idea for his poem was given to him by the stories told around the hut fire by Jack Riley, when Tom’s father, Walter Edward Mitchell, took him on the long day’s ride out to Tom Groggin, and they spent the night camped with Riley.’ 

Tom was a fine story teller and there was a feeling in the family that he was embroidering the story about his father Walter Edward having taken Banjo Paterson to meet Jack Riley at Tom Groggin. At that time we had a can labelled ‘Bullshit Spray’ on the kitchen shelf and on occasions Tom was given a liberal spraying. That was before I learned that Tom was telling the truth!

Corryong’s richest memorial to Jack Riley and Banjo Paterson’s poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’ is Corryong’s Man from Snowy River Museum with its artefact and archival collections relating to Banjo Paterson and to Jack Riley and the replica of Jack Riley’s hut faithfully built according to the original photographs of the hut. When there is an Upper Murray Man from Snowy River and Jack Riley Trail, the Museum must have pride of place. 

In pride of place in the Museum there is a Second World War Jeep in which in February 1948 and before there were any roads, Tom and Elyne Mitchell drove across the Great Dividing Range from the Upper Murray to the Chalet at Charlotte’s Pass. History doesn’t relate whether Tom and Elyne already knew that in 1905 Banjo Paterson and J Arnott had driven from Sydney to Melbourne in the Dunlop Reliability Trials and the following year had crossed the Great Dividing Range from Yass to Jindabyne and Cooma. One thing is certain that both Paterso and the Mitchells pushed the boundaries of the possible to explore what was possible.

Paterson’s poems referring to the Upper Murray are: ‘The Man from Snowy River’, ‘Father Riley’s Horse’ and ‘Johnny Riley’s Cow: A Ballad of Federation’.

Clancy of the Overflow

As Kiley’s Run is located roughly 32km east of Gundagai and 45km north of Tumut as the crow flies, horse thief Andy Regan had to cover some distance to escape the ‘troopers of Upper Murray side’!

Clancy of the Overflow is included in the collection of Paterson’s poems referencing the Upper Murray. In ‘The Man from Snowy River’ – ‘Clancy came down to lend a hand’: